Editorial 13.4, April/May 2011. by Deirdre Helfferich "He's Guilty." These irresponsible words spoken by President Obama recently about Bradley Manning were emblematic of a profound moral malaise that has infected America and spread like gangrene throughout our national discourse. It is the assumption that the accused is guilty, followed by the punishment of the accused prior to or instead of trial, sometimes for years. For almost a decade, we have had hundreds of people imprisoned and tortured at Guantanamo Naval Base, detained indefinitely without proof or conviction of wrongdoing. In fact, we knew that many of them were completely innocent, yet we continued to hold them, as the recent Wikileaks documents release shows. And we still don’t have enough evidence even to try some of them. Obama issued an executive order on March 7 that, while providing a ponderously slow review possibility, continues to allow for indefinite detention without charge, a clear violation of the Constitution. According to Human Rights Watch,
As Andrea Prasow, counterterrorism counsel for HRW, said, “Signing an executive order does not suddenly make it legal to lock people up and hold them forever without proving they have committed a crime.” The United States is not the home of the brave and the land of the free. We have more people incarcerated than any other country in the world, 743 per 100,000 as of 2009 statistics. (Russia has the second-highest rate, 577 per 100,000.) This incarceration rate is very clearly racially and ethnically directed: Seventy percent of our prison population is non-white. According to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,
We also have the second-highest rate of incarceration of women (Australia leads there). One quarter of the entire world’s inmates are incarcerated in the US. The basic reasons for our egregiously high incarceration rate is that our prison sentences are much longer than elsewhere in the world, and because we incarcerate non-violent offenders, particularly as part of the War on Drugs. We routinely use solitary confinement, even on those merely accused, such as Bradley Manning, in his case with the twisted logic that it was for his own protection. According to the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, “The increasing use of high-security segregation is counter-production, often causing violence inside facilities and contributing to recidivism after release.” (Confronting Confinement, June 8, 2006. Report available on line at www.prisoncommission.org/pdfs/Confronting_Confinement.pdf). This is one element of a sick, underlying acceptance of torture when we accuse and then confine people. Those confined become, by virtue of their confinement, “guilty,” as Obama stated. And the guilty can, in this worldview, be subjected to any treatment. Torture is justified! cry the apologists (including John Yoo, who was the featured guest at the Alaska Bar Association conference in Fairbanks the first week of May). Torture, indefinite detention, extreme and cruel punishiment: these things are routine in the United States today. The essential, and most important, aspect of allowing or justifying torture (including sleep deprivation, long-term solitary confinement, and other euphemistically termed “enhanced interrogation techniques”—a semantic distinction only) into our official panoply of legal police, correctional, or military methods is simply this: it makes us a country of torturers. Torture is not the tool of free and just people. It is the tool of tyrants, of butchers, of Stalins and Pol Pots and Hitlers. It is the method of cowards and sadists. Is that really the company we want to keep? | ||
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